Need weekend plans? Meet Jason Das, Richard Alomar, Josiah Hanchett and me at Moleskine's New York City Stories event this Saturday, May 17. Jason and I will be sketching at Moleskine's Time Warner Center (Columbus Circle) kiosk store and Richard and Josiah will be sketching at the Soho store.

To prepare, last weekend I tried out the Moleskine Art Plus Sketch Album to get comfortable with its smooth 81 lb paper.

In general I found that dry media worked beautifully, as advertised. Colored pencils, Noodler's Lexington Gray ink in a fountain pen, Pitt pens, Pigma Micron pens, Neocolor II crayons, etc. love this paper. Get any amount of water on it, however, and it's a different story -- the paper buckles and little dashes appear that don't go away even when dry.

I did find, however, that gesso or a layer of acrylic paint on the page created a decent ground for applying water-based media. Shellac-based ink splashes were fine, too.

Here's my "media sampler":

For a plein air convention, we sure spent a lot of time indoors! :) Close-ups of the demonstrating artists' palette and easel were projected onto big screens at either side of the stage, so everyone could get a detailed view even from the back of the room.

Unlike at the Urban Sketching symposia, where everyone constantly has their pens out, I noticed that very few people here actually sketched while watching demos or lectures. What I did notice (at least in the smaller watermedia track sessions) is that many attendees would use their smartphones to search for artists or books that the speaker mentioned in real time -- an interesting "second-screen" experience.

Wednesday's highlight was an entertaining demonstration by Vermont-based artist Charlie Hunter. His moody, monochromatic depictions of decaying New England infrastructure were a refreshing standout at a conference full of trees, mountains and crashing waves.

Hunter uses water-mixable oils, squeegees, hardware store chip brushes, and even Stim-U-Dents -- and his compositions are pitch perfect.

On the watermedia stage, we watched Baltimore watercolorist and contemporary impressionist Stewart White. His work is sketchy and spontaneous, and he works in a variety of media -- watercolor, oil, gouache. White's colors dance on the page -- his juxtapositions of complementary colors really make his images pop. Like Hunter, he sometimes uses unconventional mark-making tools -- a shaving brush for big washes, a golf tee to scratch out tree branches -- as he paints.

Following White's demo was one by Andy Evansen -- his loosely rendered watercolor of a farmyard scene looked like nothing until the very last strokes, when suddenly it all came together. Magical.

The evening's paint-out was at Carmel-by-the-Sea. It was interesting to actually see the town in the daylight; last year during our LA to SF drive we reached there in the evening and left very early the following day.

I probably should have picked something more urban to paint, but I ended up with most of the other artists, who were clustered on or near the beach. I was struck by the bright Ireland green of the sliver of Pebble Beach visible in the distance; I can see why it's a mecca for those who love golf.

You can tell that I didn't exactly plan the placement of the figures in advance, so they are rather unfortunately see-through.



Earlier, at the expo, I'd let "Guerrilla Painter" Carl Judson of Judsons Art Outfitters talk me into purchasing a multi mount collapsible umbrella, so I decided to try it out.



It worked quite well, even in the light breeze. You can see how it's attached in this close-up.



Perhaps the most compelling session I attended was on Thursday: The dynamic Alvaro Castagnet charmed a packed house with his exuberant demonstration of a city scene in watercolor. His bold, evocative work is of course made possible by a very thorough knowledge of the fundamentals -- "edge, shade, value, color," as he noted during his talk.

After the indoor portion of the convention ended, we were supposed to go painting at Point Lobos -- but M. and I decided instead to take advantage of the weather and play hooky. We headed to Pinnacles National Park, about an hour and a half to the southeast.

It's the newest of our national parks, having been designated as such just over a year ago. To have its trails largely to ourselves was sublime -- on this Thursday afternoon we saw maybe five or six other visitors, tops. There are enormous boulders and rock spires and craggy peaks and narrow passings through pitch-dark caves.

This should give you a sense of scale (yes, that's me in the corner).



I was tired after all the rock-scrambling and knuckle-scraping but still managed to take a few minutes for a quick sketch.



Dinner back in Monterey at 1833 -- a dark, romantic warren of uniquely decorated flicker-lit rooms in an old adobe house -- was the perfect ending.

Our last morning was spent at Fisherman's Wharf, where all of us conventioneers (dozens? hundreds?) lined the esplanade with our easels and brushes as the sea lions barked and the buskers sang.





Here's my watercolor of the scene, done on Yupo synthetic paper. Although it's challenging to control the paint on the slick surface, color will lift quite easily, allowing for some interesting effects.



My suitcase barely fit all the stuff I brought back -- in addition to the umbrella and brushes, there were promotional giveaways of paint from Royal Talens and Golden, plus a set of Sennelier "vintage color" oils I won in a raffle. I have a swatch of Golden's new QoR watercolors to play with, plus a pad of Canson Mi-Teintes Touch pastel paper and a Ray-Mar gatorfoam panel.

Can't wait for warm weather so I can try out all the new stuff!

This is the third year that Eric Rhoads and his crew at Plein Air magazine have put on this massive extravaganza of all things outdoor painting. In previous years, we were always at London Book Fair during this event so I couldn't attend. Third time's the charm.

We flew to San Jose (about an hour north of Monterey) via Salt Lake City. I'm sure I've flown over Utah before, but wow, that was one stunning view -- and that's just the airport?!



It's very close to downtown, and we had a long enough layover, but we opted out of the free Mormon heritage Temple Square tours from the airport ... figured we'd see the city another time, because those mountains just begged to be sketched.

Our flight was a little delayed, so we reached Monterey in our rental car with minutes to spare before the convention began. The humorous opening keynote was by master plein air painter Kevin Macpherson.

He described his recent work painting portraits and teaching in China and spoke broadly about the need to invest in yourself. Tip: Have your photo taken with someone shorter so you look tall in comparison. Here's Kevin doing just that.



The keynote was followed by Shelby Keefe's "Beats and Brushwork" -- part painting demo, part performance art. Grooving to her own original electronic music composition, she danced her brush across the canvas to render three bold, impressionist house fronts against a distant cityscape.



The convention had four stages, so I could choose among oil, water media, pastel and other demonstrations throughout the week. In addition, many of the expo vendors had set up demo easels at their booths, so there was no shortage of opportunities to watch artists at work.

Each day began with Marketing Boot Camp, where Eric Rhoads shared advice for promoting and selling art. Yes, he's relentlessly self-promotional and never misses an opportunity to market his DVDs and events and magazines but can you really argue with someone who preaches what he practices?

A lot of his advice is just good sales strategy, but he tailors it to the audience and notes that most of the people listening won't bother putting any of it into practice. Those few who do are likely to see their brand get a boost (not least because he'll promote them as his success stories in next year's conference: the few attendees who hadn't heard of Camille Przewodek, Lori McNee and Lori Putnam prior to the event sure know them now).

A highlight was watching Rosemary, of artisan brush maker Rosemary & Co., demonstrate how she crafts her popular handmade brushes. The hairs are never trimmed, she noted, to preserve their natural ends -- they are carefully tap-tap-tapped into shape.



She didn't bring a ton of watercolor brushes as so many of the attendees were oil/acrylic painters but I did snag a few to try -- a goat hair mop, for washes, and a pure squirrel mop. The squirrel holds a lot of water yet still manages to make a fine line when needed -- I'm excited to use this one more.



All week, during the daytime (when we were indoors) it was warm and sunny. The evenings (when we went out to paint) were unfortunately classic NoCal coastal: cold, damp, foggy. A few of us snuck out to feel the sun on our faces at Fisherman's Wharf between sessions:







We shivered through our first paint out, at Asilomar State Beach in Pacific Grove. Here's a shot of my setup, with the adorable tiny folding stool I bought a few weeks ago at Go Outdoors in London.



Between the chilly breeze and the sand, it was hard to stay focused. I struggled through a watercolor and then did a few opaque sketches with the addition of white gouache.





The surfers were having a better time than we were, that evening!



[To be continued...]

Pausing for breath -- two trips down, two to go in this five-week odyssey. Last two weeks were abroad, for work; next up is a vacation week, thankfully!

Started with a few days shuttling between our two London offices. It was chilly but we didn't let the weather stop us from going out in the evenings.

Covent Garden is touristy, but the White Lion had surprisingly good food. I didn't care for their sticky toffee pudding, though -- I've had better elsewhere.





On Saturday went off to visit our friends in Buckinghamshire. They treated us to a cozy pub lunch at the Red Lion in Little Missenden (nearby Great Missenden is known for being the home of the late great Roald Dahl).



The Red Lion offered loads of rustic atmosphere, complete with a fireplace, low ceilings and antiques. I had my standby ploughman's -- bread, cheese, chutney, pickle, salad.

We worked off our lunch by hiking through muddy fields in the Chiltern countryside for what seemed like miles. My shoes for done for by the time we reached our "goal": Pednor House, a timber-framed building with a dovecote, once used as a maternity hospital. So I perched on a little stepping stone near a fence and sketched the sheep and an old barn while waiting to be collected by car.





The idea behind all the walking was to tire ourselves out for the red-eye flight to Delhi. It worked.

After landing in India we went straight to Khan Market to meet my cousin. On the Metro coming back to our hotel in Gurgaon, I amused myself by sketching fellow passengers.



The days were packed with meeting after meeting but I did manage to get a sketch in, of the musicians at Diya, the Indian restaurant at the Leela Hotel.



On our way back to New York, we stopped in London again for the weekend and stayed in Maida Vale. We walked along the Regent's Canal, stopping to gawk at the colorful houseboats (I don't think I could live in one, though M. thinks he could). :)

Upon landing in Cleveland, I took a half-hour to sit on the desk in my fifth-floor room at the Aloft hotel and sketch the bright PanAm blue span of the Shoreway Bridge. The furnishings in this hotel aren't so luxe, but the expansive views compensate. I never get tired of watching the river traffic on the Cuyahoga, hearing the ding of the RTA Waterfront line at my feet, feeling the room quiver temblor-style as the miles-long freight trains rumble-roll past.

(Pitt marker and watercolors in Strathmore hardbound watercolor sketchbook)

A rainy day (imagine that!) last April in London. The venue? Bibendum, the Conran mecca, erstwhile home of the namesake Michelin Man. I splashed in after a long, drenching stroll on Fulham Road and stopped at the Oyster Bar to give my umbrella a rest. Spied this vignette through the glass so out came the camera -- snap, snap.

The collaged paper on the watercolor is from the South Kensington section of Muirhead's Short Guide to London (1953). It was a flea market find; I adore old Baedekers.

From the introduction:

London is still labouring under the stress of six years of war : many buildings of historic and artistic interest have been destroyed by enemy action, and still more have not yet been restored to their normal condition ; so that the descriptions in the present volume must needs be provisional in many instances.

Just a few more weeks till I get my annual fix of the city across the pond.

Little Red Barn in Vermont, from an original photo. Holbein gouache in Strathmore Toned Gray sketchbook.

Since we're not going to London Book Fair this year, I've decided to attend the 3rd Annual Plein Air Convention & Expo in Monterey, California. I've been thinking about what materials to take besides watercolor. All the outdoor videos from last year's convention show painters dealing with a lot of wind (it is the coast, after all), so I'd probably have to invest in slower-drying acrylics if I went that route.

Gouache, on the other hand, seems to fit the bill nicely. It is compact, can be rewetted, and seems perfect for the smaller supports I'd be painting on given I'm taking two flights there and back. Feels like gouache (or even just adding opaque white to regular watercolors) flies under the radar a bit.

I've been looking at artists like Nathan Fowkes for inspiration, and playing with different papers. I'm really liking the way gouache looks on the Strathmore Toned Gray paper, and will try others.

What's your experience (if any) with gouache?

Title TBD - abstraction of boats in Rowayton, Connecticut. From an original photo. Acrylic on board, 16x16.

This painting has been on and off my easel since 2011. I'm calling it done.

Missed last Saturday's Worldwide Sketchcrawl but went crawling on Sunday instead.



Had breakfast at Lorca in Stamford (who can resist that blueberry rooibos tea?) and then drove around the snowy landscape of Caramoor in Katonah, NY, to sketch from inside the car. In the warmer months the lovely garden and grounds play host to beautiful music performances.





The above sketches were all done in a Stillman & Birn Gamma series sketchbook (yes, the one I got at the USK Symposium in Lisbon - wow, that was a long time ago).

The following two were done in an Arches field sketchbook. I seem to have a hit-or-miss experience with this paper. It doesn't seem to be consistent (maybe it's the sizing applied to the paper), and I find that it sometimes "sucks in" my paint and dulls it.





Back home, I opened a pack of handmade-in-Catalunya 100% cotton watercolor paper I'd bought last year in Barcelona to test it out. The surface is quite rough. I chose a less-than-optimal subject (from a photo taken a while ago, probably an abandoned barn in the Adirondacks) but I like the way the paper takes water and paint.

Joined the NYC Urban Sketchers this weekend at the Hispanic Society of America, on Broadway at 155th Street. It's so lovely to discover places that aren't tourist-mobbed. Founded in the early 1900s, the museum/library showcases paintings, sculptures, textiles and decorative arts. Its two-storey central court proved a sienna-hued oasis on this snowy/sleety winter day. The "Vision of Spain" murals by Joaquin Sorolla alone are worth the visit -- they fill an entire octagonal room and are luminous, larger-than-life, drenched with color. If you like Sargent, these are a must-see.